A Plea for Religion
The Prospects of Humanism. By Lawrence Hyde. (Gerald Howe. 10s. 6d.). - - Ma. LAWRENCE HYDE'S first book, The Learned Knife., attracted the attention of the discerning, notably of Pro- fesior Macmurray, who listed it, in the pamphlet issued in connexion with his broadcast talks, as a book significant of recent tendencies. Mr. Hyde now tells us that he hopes to conclude his trilogy with a volume on modern religious tendencies. The present book may be regarded as likely to be the most important of the three, the first haVing been in a sense of the nature of prolegomena. What Mr.. Hyde: attempts may be indicated best in his own words : " It would be idle (ho writes) to pretend that the object of this study is not that of advancing a plea for Religion . . . it remains true that that plea-is made more • by impliCation otherwise."'
Mr. Hyde's primary concern
"has been to show that in the end the purely humanistic attitude to the world breaks down, and that in so breaking down it points beyond itself to the superior validity of the religious experience."
The spiritual condition of " the modern cultivated person " is interestingly diagnosed :
" The great mass of more highly educated men and women to-day —those anyway of a more spiritual type—are psychologically unstable, restless, unfulfilled, and morbidly self-conscious, and all this because they are attempting to reduce their transactions with life to purely aesthetic and humanistic terms."
The conclusion is given in a paragraph that is worth quoting in full :
" I do not mean that in most cases there is any other course open to them. In declining to associate themselves with existing religious organizations of a traditional type they are, I am convinced, follow. ing a perfectly right instinct. For any individual who is truly possessed of the modern consciousness no other course is possible. The religion of the Churches is a dead religion ; on that point one must remain firm. What I want to emphasize, rather, is the fact that it is little use for modern educated people to pretend that they can get along without any religion beyond the vague idealism of the cultured. Their lives have no secure spiritual foundation, and at heart they know that this is so—in spite of the sense of the whole and all the rest of it. And until some new Religion takes shape which will at the same time prove acceptable to their intelligences and provide them with a proper frame-work for their lives, they will remain, if they have been spiritually quickened, profoundly unhappy at heart."
If it may be said without offence, the fact that one of Mr. Hyde's generation has seen so far and has not hesitated to communicate his insight is of happy augury.
The argument might be amplified and perhaps strengthened. The modern world, with its peculiar genius for taking the bad and leaving the good, sometimes appears to have inherited the narrowness without the depth of theology. It seems alternately so pitifully self-confident and equally pitifully despairing, and childishly pleased with its new scientific toys. It hardly seems capable of knowing that mankind is hardly yet quite born, that we know so little, if indeed we know at all. It lacks communion and seems to think to make up for not knowing where it is going by going there very quickly. Signs, such as Mr. Hyde's book, that there are those who recognize the world's spiritual condition, are good ground for hope. But the shallowness of those who think they have shed all illusions is at once pathetic and comic. Our education is so slow and so slipshod. The horror of thoroughness, the impatience for final conclusions, are symptomatic of man's extreme immaturity. Whether modern man will prove equal to such liberty as he has
attained as the necessary step to further advance may even be questioned. Here again the signs are perhaps faintly
favourable. When the departmentalizing of information is recognized as something different from the growth of true knowledge, we may more generally achieve that intellectual humility which may not be wholly different from what a theologian would call grace.
Such homiletic reflections are inevitably stimulated by a book so vital and so honest as Mr. Hyde's. A bigger philo- sophical equipment would have been possible : we find von Hugel but not Hegel, Dante but not Dewey. But it is idle to complain that Mr. Hyde is not the complete polymath. He reflects the malaise of a generation which would probably like to find religion. It is the hope of those who think, that this time it will be realized that religion is not so much rule or rite or doctrine, but that even without mysticism it can be regarded perhaps best as a kind of sight.
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